BitThief Torrent Client

BitThief is a BitTorrent client developed by the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory in Zurich that manages to download torrents without uploading. Overall the downloads rates are a bit slower than with other clients, but on well-seeded torrents the performance of BitThief is comparable to any other client.

BitThief is based on the mainline client and Azureus, and is written in Java. The client uses some simple alterations that make it possible to download torrents without uploading. It constantly pretends to be a newly arrived peer that doesn’t have anything to offer itself.

Additionally, the client re-announces itself many times during the start of the download, and it ignores the 30 minute announce interval. The goal is to establish as much connections with other peers as possible. BitThief then exploits other peers, and opens up a lot of simultaneous connections, 500, compared to 80 on default by the mainline client. One of the downfalls of this aggressive approach is that it will instantly crash a lot of routers. It took less than 4 seconds before my router gave up when I attempted to download a popular Ubuntu release.

more info at: http://dcg.ethz.ch/projects/bitthief/

download from: http://dcg.ethz.ch/projects/bitthief/download.php